Woody Allen is accused of sexually assaulting one of his daughters in 1993. / 2011 photo by Matt Sayles/Associated Press

Detroit Free Press Columnist

To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous. — Chinese proverb

Woody Allen’s adopted daughter, now 28, has created a sensation by asserting, in an open letter published on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog, that the celebrated filmmaker sexually assaulted her when she was 7 years old.

The allegation is the same one Dylan Farrow and her mother, actress Mia Farrow, have been making since 1993, soon after Allen revealed that he was in a romantic relationship with 20-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, whom Farrow and her former husband, Andre Previn, had adopted when Soon-Yi was a young child.

Besides ending his 12-year relationship with Mia Farrow, the disclosure of Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi triggered an explosive custody battle for the three children he and Farrow were raising together. It was in the course of that dispute that Dylan Farrow’s sexual abuse allegation came to light.

In 1993, an investigative team at Yale-New Haven Hospital concluded that Dylan Farrow’s allegations were likely unfounded, and the prosecutor in charge of the case declined to file charges against Allen (although he felt obliged to add that he, personally, believed young Dylan’s account, a remark for which a bar disciplinary panel eventually sanctioned him).

Yet today, many people who initially dismissed Dylan’s accusation have concluded that Allen must have molested his daughter after all. Indeed, those who continue to express skepticism about Dylan’s story are now accused of revictimizing her, disrespecting other abused children and generally making the world safer for child predators of every kind.

Kristof, who acknowledges that he is a friend of Mia Farrow and Dylan’s younger brother Ronan, says that in recognizing Allen’s lifetime contributions to cinema at last month’s Golden Globe awards ceremony, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association effectively accused Allen’s daughter “either of lying or of not mattering.”

Jessica Valenti, whose blog posts for the Nation have attracted more than 55,000 followers, charges that Allen’s defenders are willfully turning a blind eye to his crimes.

“It’s easier to ignore what we know to be true,” she writes. “But the more we hold on to the things that make us comfortable and unthinking, the more people will be hurt — and the more growing room we’ll create for monsters.”

What has pushed so many people from skeptical complacency to indignant certainty?

The only new evidence is Dylan Farrow’s harrowing first-person account, a narrative that bears all the hallmarks of an authentic, deeply felt injury. To many readers, the specificity of her recollections — she says that Allen forced her to lie on her stomach and play with her brother’s train set while he sexually assaulted her in “a dim, closet-like attic” of her mother’s Connecticut estate — is, in itself, powerful evidence of their veracity.

I was not immune to the power of Dylan’s vivid account. When I first encountered it online this past weekend, I began reading it aloud to my wife, who shared my visceral reaction: “I just don’t know,” I said, “how he can survive this.”

But as documentary filmmaker Robert B. Weide notes in an exhaustively detailed web post defending Allen’s persistent claims of innocence, the account Dylan shared with Times readers is the same one psychiatric investigators rejected as not credible in 1993. (Or, to be more precise, one of the same accounts; among the reasons the Yale-New Haven investigators cited for discounting 7-year-old Dylan’s story was her inconsistency on the key point of where she had been touched.)

Weide recalls the psychiatric team’s conclusion that Dylan’s stories “had a rehearsed quality” and its observation that “even before the claim of abuse was made last August, the view of Mr. Allen as an evil and awful and terrible man permeated the (Farrow) household. The view that he had molested Soon-Yi and was a potential molester of Dylan permeated the household.”

If his accuser’s account is true, Weide notes, “it means that in the middle of custody and support negotiations, during which Woody needed to be on his best behavior, in a house belonging to his furious ex-girlfriend, and filled with people seething mad at him, Woody, who is a well-known claustrophobic, decided this would be the ideal time and place to take his daughter into an attic and molest her, quickly, before a house full of children and nannies noticed they were both missing.”

Neither Weide’s skepticism nor the investigators’ conclusion that 7-year-old Dylan was either “emotionally disturbed” or “coached or influenced by her mother” conclusively disprove her allegations against Allen. Indeed, she counts the Yale-New Haven investigators (“doctors willing to gaslight an abused child”) among her tormentors, although it’s unclear why a team enlisted by the Connecticut State Police would favor the accused assailant.

Even Weide shares the consensus view that Dylan Farrow sincerely believes her own account, and he says she is to be congratulated for the courage of her convictions, whether or not the evidence supports them.

But sincerely held convictions and facts are not interchangeable. And if I (and many other journalists of both genders) remain hesitant to embrace Farrow’s first-person narrative as the definitive version of what took place that August afternoon in 1993, it’s because we have too often seen our own gut feelings overwhelmed by the slow accumulation of contrary evidence.

I don’t know if Allen molested his daughter. But it seems ludicrous to assert, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he did. Those who express certainty about Allen’s guilt may be responding to any number of understandable emotions — sympathy for a vulnerable child, disgust at Allen’s relationship with another of his ex-friend’s daughters, anger at the many well-documented instances in which legitimate complaints of sexual abuse have gone unheeded by law enforcement authorities. But none of these corroborates Dylan Farrow’s deadly serious allegation.

The importance of allowing the facts to overcome our most powerful instincts, strongest gut feelings, and deepest sympathies is a lesson journalists learn over and over again. Yes, things are usually “what they seem.” But the sense of fair play that undergirds not just our own judicial system but the ethical code of most civilized people compels us to resolve legitimate doubts in favor of the accused.

In the matter of Woody Allen and his adopted daughter, all we know for sure is how little we know for sure.